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Originally Posted by Lev Lafayette
Two assumptions you've made here.
a) They have the money, and adventurers shouldn't really have a lot of that (the income table is a pretty good estimate of the money and lifestyle required), especially given how specialised the skill is and the expertise desired and
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It only has to happen once, and it doesn't take much to blow that table out of the water; if all adventurers are making is the amount a soldier is, they might as well quite the gig, as being a soldier is probably safer. In addition, as soon as you get someone who's willing to live frugally to do so, they can surely accumulate it.
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b) They have the time. To train up to 75% from a low level would require about 18 months of doing nothing else but learning Duration for 40 hours a week and nothing else. Then they have to learn a spell as well, so that's another 18 months; and have the MPs and FreeINT.
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They could easily _start_ with the spell; after all, you normally get some form of magic as part of your background, and unlike the manipulations, spells improve by experience. Given this tended to be worse on exactly the sort of spell you could use regularly (an attribute boost, Damage Boost or the spell that functioned as Damage Resistance) the training issue isn't nearly as severe there. Its no harder to improve those than any other skill you use halfway frequently.
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and
c) They've actually found a teacher in the first place who is capable and prepared to engage in such a process, keeping in mind that only Sorcerers have access to the Duration skill by default.
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Again, it only needs one; and if you need to bend over backwards not to let it happen, thats a premie facie indication its an unbalanced and broken mechanic.
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At the end of it they would be crippled in any other way except with expertise in one spell and duration skill.
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Given how much ability Damage Boost with Duration benefits a whole party, that doesn't make a lick of difference.
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That the three requirements would come together seems to me a little unlikely. Or,
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Two of them are trivial, and the third is only avoided if the GM is bending over backwards to do so. PCs already routinely did the equivelent of the first two over the course of their careers in RQ, or no RuneLords would have existed in Glorantha at all; after all, the same training issue was involved in improving any Knowledge skill, which several cults required for Rule Lords. So you're not blocking this with three features, but one.
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if you wish to compare it to the real world, how many people would give up their work and income for 3 years, and hire an extremely expensive expert for the same period of time to learn two very specialised abilities?
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The kind that make a living week in and week out by trying to get themselves killed, when the specialized abilities make that immensely less likely?
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As mentioned previously, I am not reviewing what you did or didn't see. I am interested in what campaign packs I've played released under the RQ3 rules (Ninja, Vikings, Dorastor and iirc Griffin Island) actually stated. Indeed, even RQ I and II stated it more explicitly with (iirc) one real day = one game week default.
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I'd be fascinated to find that in Griffin Island, and honestly, even if it was, it had _nothing_ to do with the core rules, which had no such guideline even in suggestion. What a set of campaign packs do and what the rules do have no relationship.
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Again, YMMV. You may have played a different game to what I played (and still play) and with different defaults. But this is not what I am reviewing; I am reviewing it as it is written. Not my personal experience, not your personal experience, just how it is written.
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No, at most you're reviewing it through the lens of those campaign packs.
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Anyway we've both made our points fairly completely. There is really no need to digress further on what is a fairly marginal aspect of the game.
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Given it was a cripplingly overpowered aspect of one of the three magic systems, I considered it anything but marginal, and I know I'm far from alone; its one of the two facets of the game that consistently come up in critiques of it (albiet sometimes in the form of mentioning how underpowered sorcery was for beginners and overpowered for the advanced). So I don't think its a digression at all.